The world as we knew it has drastically changed with the entrance of the Coronavirus in our worlds. There is not a country in the world that is not influenced by the disease and people have to stay at home, in quarantaine, or are in the hospital. While the effects of the disease itself are very visible in the streets, the effect economically are not fully visible yet. Needless to say though, is that we all will be hit with some economic setbacks. Quartz Online Magazine has charted the effects on this page.

Personally, we believe that economical repercussions will be devastating for a lot of people around the world. Goldman Sachs states that unemployment will hit 15% in the second quarter and GDP is down 34% and that is just the beginning.

We can all do the math. Presidents all over the world have sworn they will help businesses and individual small business owners and freelancers who have lost their income, but the question is: With what money? Pretty much all countries in the world are having budgetary deficits, so the money doesn’t really exist. And if you understand just a little bit about economics, you know that these countries basically start printing more money (so to speak) and thus generate inflation of the currency. Yes, we are in trouble (at least, many of us)!

What does it mean for us, Amazon sellers?

If you only source in the USA (when selling on Amazon.com) you might run into suppliers who have gone bankrupt, depending on what they are supplying. But the main problem seems to be sourcing from China. First of all, no production is occurring there for over 3 months now and the factories are still not fully running to capacity. The main problem we see though is the economical “sanctions” that will follow after the Corona dust has settled.

Notice that President Trump is consistently speaking about the “Chinese virus” and has mentioned on several press conferences that China should have warned the world earlier. Given the fact, there was already an economic war going between the USA and China, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that several things are going to happen in the not so far future.

Inflation will occur worldwide (which will especially hit the “pensionados” because the worth of their hard-earned dollars will go down dramatically, and China will be hit with repercussions. Import taxes on Chinese goods will rise. And given the fact that the European Union was also preparing laws to restrict Joe Schmo to import from China, you can imagine some private label sellers who are sourcing only from China, are getting a little nervous. And if they don’t, they should.

In today’s podcast, we talk about what you can do to avoid being hit hard in the near future when you only source from China. We have connections ourselves in China, but right now are more focusing on our offices and manufacturers in countries like India, Vietnam and Thailand.

If you want to partner with us in India and want to know more about sourcing from that country (and other South East Asian countries) you can Whatsapp us on the following number:

Note: In the transcript, my wife is A. and myself, I am J. Sometimes you will see square brackets in the file like this [ some text ] This is to indicate that I am saying something wrong or that the text has a grammar mistake or other mistake that happened while speaking. This is not some scripted recording. The text between the brackets is just for your convenience and so you do not wonder why we are saying something wrong. Fortunately, this doesn’t happen a lot but I thought to mention it, so this is clear.

As a last remark: When there is a term or a word you do not fully understand (or an abbreviation) make sure you clear that up using Google or our FBA glossary, which you can find here: FBA.CAFE Glossary of FBA and Amazon terminology.